(Blankets — Witnessed — The Speaker — Memory — True Devotion — Dimmed World — Stop — Eyes — Where — Gone — Warn)
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~~~ are used for changing the perception of vision (POV)
••• denotes flashback
*** denotes time skip
** denotes background sounds
… denotes silence
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The corridor rang beneath her tread and the blankets shifted in her arms with every step like reluctant beasts refusing the direction of travel.
She had gathered too many. She had known this from the moment she accepted them and had accepted them anyway because Hazel's confidant had looked upon her with that particular expression, the one peculiar to people who delegate burdens onto others whilst believing privately that the burden is improving the recipient, and so she had received the charge with outward dignity and inward resentment, the way one receives any tax levied by someone too comfortable to feel its weight.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
Her feet echoed through the old passages and came back altered. All sounds did here. Voices returned thinner. Laughter came back sorrowful. Even silence seemed to deepen after brushing the ancient walls, as though the stones held memory and preferred grief and worked tirelessly to convert whatever entered into whatever they preferred, which was grief, and they were patient at it.
The confidant. Hazel's confidant. That one.
Too pragmatic, she thought, as though pragmatism were a virtue rather than a manner of failing to understand what was actually happening beneath the surface of events. Too willing to soften the edges of things and call the softening prudence. She thought of her and felt the familiar quiet friction and set it aside with the practiced ease of long habit. There were more immediate concerns. There were always more immediate concerns when one was carrying too many blankets and also trying not to revisit what she had witnessed in the cathedral that Still Light.
Hazel. She had seen her crawl.
The image sat in her like a stone sits in standing water. The stone is present and immovable as it alters the current of everything that moved around it. The ichor had poured from Hazel's mouth in thick floods, black as pitch, spreading across the metalline floor in slow dark pools that caught the censer light and returned it wrong. Her ceremonial robes had been blackened with it. Her hands, her knees. She had dragged herself forward through her own voided substance with her head bent and her body trembling not from weakness but from something worse than weakness, from the unbearable proximity of a thing too large for the vessel it was entering.
Sera had watched.
She had stood among the congregation and watched and felt something she had no clean name for and did not immediately try to name because some feelings named too quickly became false accounts of themselves. It was not pity. She would not call it pity. It was also not the uncomplicated awe that the younger Seekers had worn openly on their faces, that wide-eyed sufficiency with which people receive events that exceed their comprehension and simply accept the exceeding as the full story.
She was braver than most. This she knew without vanity the way one knows the layout of a room one has lived in long enough.
She had walked into darkness that made others stop at thresholds. She had performed offices that required the rest of her brethren to be excused from the room first, not all of them willingly, not all of them intact afterward in the specific ways that mattered. She was not large. She had been called short more times than she had been called by her name, and each time it landed like a boot on a bad ankle, precise and unnecessary, and each time she had looked at the speaker with an expression that communicated clearly what she thought of them and returned to whatever she had been doing. She was not large. She was not Hazel.
But watching Hazel on that floor, she had understood more precisely what the distance between them measured. And understanding it did not close it, and not closing it did not stop the measuring.
…
Well, she said to no one, and there her words failed her entirely.
What language sufficed. What sentence could be assembled that was adequate to what she had witnessed. The memory had not lodged the way ordinary memories lodged. Ordinary memories are retrievable and subject to the small mercies of distortion over time, eventually becoming a softer version of themselves. But that* memory had lodged the way a blade lodged in cartilage. It was precise, it was permanent, and it was resistant to extraction.
She exhaled and shifted the blankets higher.
Hazel had not crawled because she could not stand. She had crawled because she would reach Him, and the distinction was the kind that separated one species of bugs from every other species. Sera recognised this courage from the outside the way one recognises a foreign country from the border, thoroughly, and without the right to claim residency. She had her own species of courage and it was a real species and she would not apologise for it. She had never required an audience for her nerve. The darkness did not care whether it was watched when you walked into it.
She thought of Hazel's face turned upward toward the figure above her. The expression on it, the expression.
She thought of it and then deliberately stopped thinking of it because some things were not for looking at directly, and Hazel's expression in that moment was one of them, and she had spent enough of the Still Light looking at things that were not for looking at directly.
Hazel was beloved of Him. This was the established fact and she had no argument with facts. But there was a species of belovedness that Hazel seemed to cultivate with the specific dedication of someone who had long since abandoned the distinction between devotion and appetite, and had called the abandonment holy, and had made the congregation recite the abandonment in unison, and had stood above them all while they recited it with those black-weeping eyes and that composed, elevated expression, and Sera had recited it along with the rest—
She nearly tripped on a seam in the floor.
Caught herself. Adjusted the blankets.
She recited because the recitation was true. That was the distinction she maintained. Between herself and Hazel. She believed. Hazel believed, yes, but Hazel also—
The thought arrived as it always arrived, unannounced, and sliding between the ribs before the defences could engage: Hazel behaved less like a Speaker and more like a woman with a particular and somewhat scandalous orientation toward the divine, and the congregation followed behind her calling it theology, and perhaps it was theology, and perhaps there was no meaningful difference, and perhaps that was the most unsettling possibility of all.
Sera adjusted the blankets again and looked at the wall.
She had taken the Void into herself. This was also established fact. Less of it than Hazel, considerably less, at a considerably lower cost, but the coldness was real and the ichor sometimes ran and the sensation of it moving through her at certain moments during deep ceremony was not a sensation she had a neutral relationship to. She knew this. She knew what she knew about herself with the careful, unflinching attention of someone who had decided long ago that self-deception was a luxury she could not afford because the debts compounded and the accounting always arrived eventually.
She was not Hazel.
She was also not unacquainted with what Hazel felt. She gripped the blankets tighter and moved.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
The corridor opened into one of the long outer galleries. Despite herself her gaze wandered through the towering arches toward the dreamscape beyond.
The world had gone dim.
Once these lands had shone pale-gold beneath soft heavens and the winds carried sweetness through gardens built by peoples whose names had perished from every surviving tongue. Now the skies hung grey and heavy as old bruising and the distant hills had the look of things exhausted by their own continued existence. Dust where dew once settled. Trees leaning as though weary of holding themselves upright for so many ages without adequate reward.
Yet there was beauty. There was always beauty in dying things if one looked long enough and without the cowardice of looking away. The clouds spread across the heaven like ash strokes on old parchment. The failing light rendered every distant ruin strangely tender. Decline had its own species of grace, not the hopeful kind, nothing so optimistic, but the honest grace of things that had stopped pretending they would endure.
She preferred honest ruin to dishonest splendour. This was perhaps why she was here and not somewhere more comfortable.
She permitted herself a faint smile at the grey expanse. Hazel would assign her scripture for that thought. Dangerously poetic, she would say, wearing the expression she reserved for thoughts she had decided were useless, and then she would produce a text calculated to redirect the tendency toward more profitable meditation. Sera had received such assignments before and they had not cured her of the tendency but they had given her a thorough knowledge of the relevant material, which she supposed was the practical aim, and she supposed Hazel had known the cure was not really the aim, and she supposed this was the sort of thing one was not meant to say aloud.
She had never said it aloud.
Tap. Tap—
She stopped.
Every muscle stopped before her mind understood why. The blankets lurched. One nearly escaped before instinct caught it back against her chest. Someone stood in the corridor. No. Not someone.
The Lord.
He stood directly before her, silent as a country before the storm arrives, and for one impossible moment every thought she possessed evacuated itself simultaneously and she became merely a body before a larger body, her comprehension stripped from her as cleanly as hide from a carcass. She was not a Godseeker in that moment. She was not braver than most. She was a small creature standing before something that had no category she had been built to process.
The blankets slipped from her hands. They struck the metalline floor with a muffled, ignominious collapse.
His head turned toward the sound.
What she heard then she would not afterwards describe. Not to anyone. Not to herself if she could prevent it. A sound that had no precedent in her experience and created a new category in the making of it and the category had no pleasant edges. She pressed herself against the wall. This she did not decide. Her body decided and she was only informed.
God forgive me for that noise.
She stood in the echoing aftermath of her own cowardice. The wall was cold and solid against her back and she was grateful for it the way one is grateful for a fixed point when everything else has ceased to feel reliable.
She was braver than most.
This was apparently what that looked like at the actual moment of encounter, and she found it genuinely instructive, and she did not have time to be mortified because He was still there and the mortification required a privacy she did not currently possess.
Slowly, with all the reluctance of a person emerging from a position that had ceased to be viable, she stepped away from the wall. Her hands twisted within the cords of her garments. She was suddenly and comprehensively aware of every flaw in her appearance simultaneously. Her robe, her hands, the specific smell of incense and honest work that clung to her, the blankets collapsed at her feet like evidence of some minor failure of character—
She made herself stop. She looked at Him.
Those eyes.
She had been told. She had read the testimonies. She had sat through Hazel's sermons on the nature of His gaze in that particular register of Hazel's voice that lived between speech and something more demanding, and she had listened with the careful attention she brought to things that mattered. None of it had been adequate preparation. Nothing could be adequate preparation for what it meant to stand inside that attention, because the testimonies were written by bugs who had survived the looking and the surviving had already altered the memory of it, softened it in the specific way that survivable things softened in retrospect to remain survivable in the retelling.
She did not look away.
This she was privately proud of in the small room of herself where pride was accounted for honestly and without embellishment. She did not look away.
The darkness moved around Him continuously. But not mere shadow, not mere absence, but living darkness, unfolding from His form in long slow tendrils, curling and receding, persistent and unhurried. The corridor seemed narrower for containing Him, as though the walls had drawn subtly inward. Reality bent around His presence visibly. Irreversibly. With the quality of something that would not return to its prior configuration once the pressure was removed.
Something moved through her. Cold. But not ordinary cold, but the cold of the deep black places beneath the world where ancient things drift blind through water that had never carried light in any form. It moved through her from the chest outward and reached places she had not known possessed the capacity for sensation of this kind.
She swallowed.
A-anything—I mean—
She stopped. She tried again.
Do you seek aught of me, my Lord?
The air thickened.
Where.
…
One word, and it was not really spoken but placed, inserted directly into the structure of her thoughts with a precision that bypassed ear and air entirely and had employed them only as a form of courtesy, and the courtesy itself was more frightening than the content of the word.
She blinked.
My Lord, she said quickly, forgive me but I—I did not wholly understand—
His gaze remained upon her. His gaze was patient, absolute, and it contained no particular judgment because judgment implied a scale and He was the scale, and she stood upon it, and the reading was complete, and she was not going to think about what the reading said.
Every foolish thought she had entertained. Every small vanity. Every moment of believing herself braver than circumstances warranted. Every uncharitable thought she had nursed in the private corridors of herself regarding Hazel, regarding the confidant, regarding the younger Seekers with their insufficient understanding and their clean eyes that had not yet been pressed against anything that left a mark, all of it lying exposed as though under glass. Organised. Illuminated. Labeled.
She felt her face heat.
Then it arrived. Understanding. Late, as it often arrived, but thorough.
The Speaker! She heard herself say it too loudly and did not correct the volume because correcting it would require additional words and she had demonstrated enough damage with the words already spent, O Hazel—she resteth within the Nursery Chamber, northeast, above—
The darkness around Him shifted. A slow and vast adjustment, like weather reconsidering its directions. His eyes widened a fraction. Only that, and only enough to acknowledge that the information had been received and processed and found sufficient.
SHE RESTETH ABOVE, MY LORD!
…
Silence. She stood in it, breathed in it.
Shall I, she ventured carefully, like a woman placing her weight on ice of uncertain thickness, bring her unto Thee?
He moved.
He rose to His full height and the motion alone drew the air from the corridor as completely as if it had been physically removed, and the darkness unfolded from Him in vast and terrible sheets, and for one moment the corridor itself seemed to consider yielding along its most fundamental seams before apparently deciding against it—
Gone.
Between one heartbeat and the next. The space where He had stood contained only metalline and the cold displacement of air, and above through the gallery arches a dark fracture lay briefly across the grey sky as though something had passed through the atmosphere at a velocity it was not forged to accommodate. The fracture closed. The sky returned to grey. The evidence was gone.
She stood alone with the collapsed blankets at her feet.
Zounds.
She said it to the empty corridor, and the corridor said nothing useful back. Then she was moving. She left the blankets. She did not feel guilty about the blankets. She gathered what remained of her faculties into the rough shape of a direction and she ran.
Hazel. He sought Hazel.
Through all of Godhome and its chambers and its sleeping Seekers and its centuries of amassed ceremony, He had come, and through, and past, and the one thing He sought was Hazel, Their Speaker. Of course it was Hazel. When was it ever anything but Hazel when you followed the question back far enough? When did the centre of anything in this congregation reveal itself to be something other than Hazel, composed and black-weeping and elevated above them all, beloved in ways that the rest of them were not beloved, chosen in ways that the rest of them were not chosen, touching and being touched by the Lord in ways—
She ran.
Past the old arches. Past the incense chambers. Past the sleeping alcoves where lesser Seekers murmured prayers in exhausted half-dreaming, unaware of what had just moved through the corridors above them and what it had done to the air.
A strange thrill had moved through her at the realisation and she had felt it and recognised it and was not finished feeling it. She was certain about this. The feeling was compounded of fear and awe and something else that she named quickly and set aside: Envy. Clean and honest and entirely useless and she had shown it the door and it had gone the way such things went when one refused to entertain them, not gone at all, merely waiting in the passage outside for the conversation to conclude.
She pressed it down and ran.
Hazel had her excellence. She had her own. They were not the same excellence. Comparing them was an exercise for bugs with idle occupation and she had, at present, extremely engaged occupation, which was to find a woman who had spent her entire life preparing for exactly this moment and warn her that the moment had arrived, which was either the most useful service she had ever rendered or the most redundant, and she suspected she already knew which.
O Hazel forgive me, she muttered without being precisely certain what she was apologising for.
The impulse to apologise preemptively where Hazel was concerned had always served her. She did not examine why. Some instincts were better trusted than interrogated.
She ran.
The corridors of the dreaming realm received her passage and altered it the way they altered everything. Her footsteps coming back to her changed, her breath returning thinner, the sound of her own speed arriving at her ears as though it belonged to someone slightly more desperate than she intended to appear. She ran and the darkness in the walls breathed around her and above her through the high arches the grey sky held its colour without apology and the world continued its long patient dying and she was small within it and running and braver than most and none of that was contradiction. The Lord had spoken one word to her and it had not been her name and that was the full and honest accounting of what had occurred.
God had come seeking His Speaker.
She ran faster.